Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 36D, December 6, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

The text from my mom said that they were coming to visit set from “3/16-4/18.” Presuming a typo, I was surprised to hear that my parents were only visiting for two days. Given we’d spent 12 years as a Navy family — my father is a former naval flight officer — I thought they might want to spend more time seeing the story of Jesse Brown, the Navy’s first Black aviator, come to life on the set of Devotion. I texted her back, mildly disappointed about their short visit, but my mom reaffirmed the dates, “3/16-4/18.” They were coming for a month — far more than I ever expected, and admittedly far longer than I initially desired, but ultimately far too short of a time I’ll forever cherish. Photos and…

For the first time in Oscar history, three Persian-language films are up for the Academy Award for best international feature. Alongside Iran’s official entry, Houman Seyyedi’s darkly comic World War III, Denmark has submitted serial killer drama Holy Spider from Iran-born, Copenhagen-based Ali Abbasi. Britain’s hopes, meanwhile, lie with Winners, a tragicomic tale about (of all things) a missing Oscar statue, from director Hassan Nazer, another Iranian expat, who lives in Scotland. Taken together, the trio of movies represents the breadth of Iranian cinema, within the country and among the filmmaking diaspora. Winners is Nazer’s love letter to his country’s filmmakers. Dedicated to Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi, Majid Majidi and Jafar Panahi, it is jam-packed with references to and quotes from other Farsi films, among them Panahi’s Taxi…

Maurice and Katia Krafft were not just two of the world’s most notable volcanologists — they were also two of the greatest filmmakers, who ventured into dangerous volcanic locations to capture images of some of the planet’s most beautiful and beguiling forms of nature. After their death during the June 3, 1991, eruption on Japan’s Mount Unzen, they left behind an incredible archive of footage that displayed not only the unpredictable nature of volcanoes, but also what it means to be a human in a chaotic world. The duo is the subject of Sara Dosa’s documentary Fire of Love, which traces an engaging love story between the Kraffts and their shared obsession. The director spoke to THR about assembling a narrative out of the Kraffts’ films and presenting the husband-and-wife…

THE TOP CONTENDERS All That Breathes (HBO) Shaunak Sen’s Hindi-language portrait of two brothers trying to save New Delhi’s black kites won Sundance’s world doc grand jury prize and the doc Gotham Award, and is up for the top Cinema Eye and Spirit awards, as well. Descendant (Netflix) Fourteen years after The Order of Myths, Margaret Brown returns to the Mobile, Alabama, area to chronicle the legacy of the last slave ship to come to America. The Obamas-backed doc was awarded a Sundance special jury prize. Good Night Oppy (Amazon) The real-life Wall-E was the Mars space rover Opportunity, which was expected to survive for 90 days but lasted 15 years, as Ryan White documents in his crowd-pleaser that also highlights the NASA employees who worked on it. Navalny (Warner…

The dance-off is a riveting, time-honored combat scenario — and no more so than in the exhilarating “Naatu Naatu” (“spice”) extravaganza in the Indian Telugu-language blockbuster RRR. In director S.S. Rajamouli’s 1920s-set action drama epic, the musical number pits the lead duo, Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan) and Komaram Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.) — based on real-life anti-colonialist revolutionaries — against an army of smug British colonizers. The battle kicks off after the pair — still unaware of each other’s true identities and intentions — embark on another classic movie theme: a pure bromance, with Raju helping his new best friend impress a love interest, the governor’s niece Jenny (Olivia Morris). After Bheem, still outfitted in his Muslim shalwar kameez disguise, accepts her invitation to an afternoon dance at…

Park Chan-wook, the world-renowned South Korean auteur best known for the floridly violent films referred to as his “Vengeance Trilogy,” wanted to tell a gentler story. It was 2019 and Park was ruminating on ideas for what would become Decision to Leave, his 11th film and first feature in six years, following a period of television work and fine art creation. He began with two competing ideas. “Over the years, I’ve watched lots of detective dramas and police procedurals, and I love these kinds of films,” he says. “But I’ve always thought the depiction of the protagonists is quite far from reality, because they’re either really tough and violent, or some kind of genius detective.” Examples in this genre are particularly prevalent in Korea, where the highest-grossing movie just this…

By Nov. 18, when a Dutch court found three men, two of them Russian and one Ukrainian, guilty of murder in absentia for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the event had almost vanished from public memory. The court found that on July 17, 2014, a Russian-made missile supplied from Russia and fired by an armed group under Russian control in eastern Ukraine brought down the civilian flight, killing all 298 people on board, including 80 children. Maryna Er Gorbach hadn’t forgotten. July 17, 2014, was Er Gorbach’s 33rd birthday, and the fateful day when the passenger airline was shot down over the occupied Donbas region is the starting point for her latest film, Klondike, Ukraine’s contender for the 2022 best international feature film Oscar. “We all remember what happened…

The new All Quiet on the Western Front, Germany’s Oscar submission for best international feature film, is an adaptation of the 1929 World War I novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque. That best-seller, based on Remarque’s experiences in the German Army, moved 3 million copies in 22 languages in its first two years in print and remains one of the great works about the trauma of war. It and its 1930 sequel, The Road Back, were banned and burned in Nazi Germany. In the U.S., All Quiet on the Western Front was adapted for the screen in 1930, produced by Carl Laemmle Jr. — son of Universal Studios founder Carl Laemmle — and directed by Lewis Milestone, who the following year would helm the landmark media satire…

In IFC Films’ Corsage, Vicky Krieps stars as Empress Elisabeth of Austria (known affectionately as Sisi) during a particular life crisis: middle age. After turning 40, the celebrated beauty finds herself fading — at least, she’s convinced as much. With her children grown and her relationship with Emperor Franz Joseph I threatened by her indifference to royal obligations, the disaffected royal becomes bored with her life, wanting nothing more than to hide away from the public that still watches her every move as if she were a 19th century influencer. Writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s irreverent biopic mixes the stoicism of a classic costume drama with postmodern twists, incorporating anachronistic songs (a chamber version of the Rolling Stones’ “As Tears Go By” is heard on the soundtrack) and modern-day vulgar hand gestures.…

Anyone whose experience of Iranian cinema is limited to the social realism and lyrical fables of Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi might be shocked by Houman Seyyedi’s World War III, Iran’s official entry for this year’s best international feature Oscar. The movie, which premiered in Venice, where it won the prize for best film in the Horizons sidebar, is a mashup of genres: part social drama, part thriller, part absurdist film industry satire. Mohsen Tanabandeh was named best actor in Venice Horizons for his portrayal of Shakib, a man who’s still traumatized by the loss, years ago, of his wife and son in a terrible earthquake, and who finds some pickup work as an extra in a World War II movie. When the film’s star has a heart attack, the…

Pakistani filmmaker Saim Sadiq assumed that when he completed his debut feature, Joyland — which took him more than six years to develop, write, shoot and edit — his work on the project would essentially be done. He was, unfortunately, mistaken. Joyland tells the story of the Ranas, a large family living in the heart of bustling Lahore. While the family yearns for the birth of a male grandson, the soft-spoken youngest son, who has a sweet but asexual relationship with a wife by arranged marriage, secretly takes up a job as a background dancer at an erotic theater, where he falls for a trans starlet. As their romance blossoms, strains emerge within the family, illuminating how each of them might be longing for a form of sexual rebellion of…